Kate on Cars July 2013 - 6 Things You Didn't Know About Cars

Kate on Cars July 20136 Things You Didn't Know About Cars

by Kate Jonasse

Here are 6 things you probably didn't know about cars...

1. The cars with the highest ticket rates are Hummers – the H2 and H3. After Hummers, the Scion TC and XB get the most tickets. But it's not the type of car that causes the high ticket rate – it's the driver. Studies show that younger drivers tend to drive faster than older drivers, and thus get more speeding tickets. Hummers and Scions tend to be driven by people in their 20s and 30s. So next time you want to let your Grandma drive your Hummer, don't worry about her getting a ticket, she'll probably be just fine as long as she stays within the speed limit. What is the least ticketed automobile? The Buick Lucerne (the average Lucerne driver is 70).

2. We pay 8 times more for a gallon of Starbucks than we do for a gallon of gasoline. A gallon of gasoline costs about $4 today, and a gallon of Starbucks coffee runs about $32. We pay more to fuel ourselves up with caffeine than we pay to fuel our cars, even though it doesn't always feel that way when you're at the pump.

3. The first speeding ticket was given in Dayton, OH in 1904 for “speeding” at 12 mph. The driver was Harry Myers, who was driving a whopping 4 mph above the speed limit. However, the first person on record to be punished for speeding was Jacob German, a New York City taxicab driver who was imprisoned for speeding down Lexington Street in Manhattan in an electric vehicle. New York didn't give paper tickets at that time. Wow your friends with that one.

4. It would take over 150 years for a car to drive to the sun. Specifically, with the sun 92,960,000 miles from the earth and a car driving at a speed of 65 mph, it would take about 163 years to drive to the sun. Of course you'd also run into problems like lack of oxygen, lack of traction, and lack of gas stations along the way. And you'd want to pack your sunscreen, like SPF a million. I suggest using a space ship instead.

5. The average American spends anywhere from 3 months to 3 years of their life stopped at redlights. This is kind of a hard thing to track because driving habits vary greatly amongst different people and age groups. But check this out - the average commute in the US is about 25 minutes. If just 4 minutes of that commute were spent sitting at stoplights, then just to get to work and back without running any additional errands you'd be sitting at stoplights for 8 minutes. Multiply that by 5 days a week for 52 weeks a year (instead of 52.4 weeks/year, and we'll pretend there are no holidays to keep the math simple), and you get about 34.7 hours a year sitting at stoplights. If a person does only this commute on each work day from the time they are 18 to the time they are 65, that's a total of about 68 days spent sitting at stoplights. Many of us drive more than this. It makes you want to find something constructive to do with your time at stoplights, doesn't it? Maybe play a memory game or something to make use of the time.

6. Automobiles are the most recycled product in the world. When a car has reached the very end of its life, it is crushed and then sent to a recycling center. The recycling center where it is shredded and separated into different types of materials that will eventually be reused. A typical car is made of about 65% steel – the rest is made of other metals, plastics, glass and other materials. Recycling metal uses about 74% less energy than making new steel.

I hope you feel smarter now, and I hope this brightened your day. You now know 6 new things about cars.

K-Tech Automotive is giving away a free 2002 Buick Regal in great condition to a deserving person in our community who is currently without transportation. Write or email them at kate@ktechautomotive.com by the end of this month (deadline July 31) with details about someone you would like to see receive a free car and why. For more details, check out www.ktechcargiveaway.com. Get your nomination in today!